ON-LINE POKER VS. LIVE POKER

I’ve played poker in Las Vegas for about three decades and remember playing at the Dunes when it was a contract room run by Johnny Moss with three tables sharing space with Keno. The big-time room in those days was the Sahara. You might well see Major Riddle, owner of the Dunes, slugging it out in a no limit ring game. One of the Sahara room dealers told about the time he was dealing the big game when the Major raised a pot with a “hand written on a napkin” title to the Dunes. I have played in most of the rooms in Vegas over the years and have been an observer of the waxing and waning of the poker industry. I was there opening day for the absolutely superb room at the Las Vegas Hilton. (In my opinion the finest poker room the city has ever seen); but, I have never seen anything even close to the current popularity of poker. Everyone now plays America’s favorite game. Most Vegas poker rooms have a player wait list for a seat to open up. Poker has been around in a little changed form for more than a century so why all the interest?
Indian casinos, tournaments on television and the Internet. Online casinos offering 24/7 action from the comfort of your home has to be the single most important factor for making poker so popular. The digital generation has grown up staring at the tube for most of their needs so the evolution of casino poker to an internet game was a natural. Internet casinos have provided the industry with the same meteoric growth curve that video poker machines did for slot departments. Players find the online experience to be much more appealing and less intimidating than sitting across the table from live players. An additional benefit is retaining your anonymity, screwing up on the tube is much less an embarrassment than doing so in a live game. Is Internet poker the same game played in Las Vegas poker rooms? In one word, No! When I play online certain elements of the game that I rely on are not there. I will never see any hole cards flashed, something I can usually count on to give me a pot or save me from contributing to a losing one (I love sunglasses, especially the mirrored ones where I can often catch a flash of color). I can study the little avatars forever and never see one bead of sweat, they never play with their chips, their nostrils don’t contract when they gulp for air and the slight facial muscle twitch just isn’t there. I can’t watch the other players reacting to the flop. I can’t hear the nervous chatter or watch the inexperienced players make rookie mistakes. Hell, I can’t even identify the rookies. What are the online tells? Do they exist? Can virtual reality nuisances be complied into some useable format that will give you a slight advantage? I have discussed this with my learned peers and they assure me that there are certain tells that may be gleaned from the small screen; but, so slight that it offers no discernable advantage. I have always been a little suspicious of the online casinos and those random number generators operating in an unregulated medium, but again, the wise ones tell me my worries are for naught. I realize that I am acting like a paranoid fool; but after all, paranoid people do have enemies too.
So, what do I see as the most obvious difference between online and live games? It has to be the cocktail girls. I live in Las Vegas so the drinks are free and provided non stop by scantily clad young ladies. When I am playing online I have to not only get my own refreshments but I have to pay for them. When I am playing in a casino and have a losing session I can always take comfort in knowing that I did have quite a few “free” drinks (How many cokes can you buy with eight hundred?). How can the online casinos ever offer this convenience? And how about those little avatars sitting stone-faced around the virtual table? How long before I can design my own character or buy a custom creation from some clever entrepreneur? How long before the onscreen game figures have their own set of tells, interact with each other, yell obscenities, throw cards, smoke, get drunk, splash pots, string bet, crowd your table space, spill drinks, tell really bad jokes, use every single poker cliché in one sentence and relate every detail of every bad beat ever suffered. I can hardly wait for the next evolutionary level of realism. Speaking of bad beats, I once was third with quad kings.